Driven: 2012 Vauxhall Maloo

Pickups are hardly the bread and butter of car sales here in the UK, even more so when it packs a 425-bhp V-8 under the hood, but if you're so inclined you can order one from Vauxhall for a cool £51,500 ($80,800) built by HSV in Australia.

GM's UK subsidiary takes occasional advantage of the Australians driving on the same side of the road as us to import models such as this to add a bit of spice to its product lineup.

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Although Vauxhall's PR representative was, "pretty sure it's the name of an Aussie elk-like creature", Wikipedia came up with an Indian businessman, Swiss musician and the car itself. Personally, I think I might reserve it for an otherwise awkward Scrabble game as there was no reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What is it like to drive? Well, a bit lumpy on our roads and the gear shift isn't exactly knife through hot butter syndrome, needing a firm arm to row it through the ratios but, boy, does it shift. The Corvette-sourced engine will smoke the rubber off those rear 20-in. alloys at the merest hint of the loud pedal hitting the floor; and you'd better hang onto the steering wheel as well since it isn't as sharp a handling machine as... Well I don't know what since this is unique on our roads and I haven't a clue how a 425-bhp pickup is supposed to perform.

I do know that rear visibility is not great and that fellow road users and pedestrians gawped at its outrageously bright yellow paint as I drove through sun bleached English villages with that familiar sound, to you but not us, V-8 low-rev burble.